Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (baptised 20 October 1614 – 1698 or 1699) was a Flemish alchemist and writer, the son of Jan Baptist van Helmont. He is now best known for his publication in the 1640s of his father's pioneer works on chemistry, which link the origins of the science to the study of alchemy.

He also spent much time in Germany and England. From 1644, when his father died, to 1658, when Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor ennobled him, he was constantly involved in diplomacy for German princes and their families.[10]

Life from 1660

His first work was a 1667 Latin treatise Alphabeti veri naturalis hebraici brevissima delineatio (usual short English title Alphabet of Nature) on Adamic language, which he equated with Hebrew.[12] He argued that the Hebrew alphabet implicitly gave a pronunciation guide, analogous to a musical notation for the tongue and voice.[13]

He was a friend of Gottfried Leibniz, who wrote his epitaph, and he introduced Leibniz to Rosenroth in 1671.[14] Leibniz writing in 1669 took the "Helmontians" seriously, as one of three contending groups in philosophy, the others being the traditionalist followers of Aristotle, and the Cartesians.[15] The Helmontians comprised remaining Paracelsans and those who took the writings of Jan Baptist van Helmont to heart.

Through his relationship as physician to Anne Conway, Viscountess Conway, he began to attend Quaker meetings, in 1675.[19] In return he introduced her to kabbalist thought. He was resident at the old Ragley Hall from 1671 until 1679, when she died.[20] Twenty years later, he was a figure in the Keithian Controversy, a schism formed in the Quakers, in which van Helmont took the side of George Keith who broke away.[21] Keith had translated van Helmont's Two Hundred Queries in 1684; it was a work of speculative theology, written in Latin in a simultaneously published version and anonymous until the following year, and van Helmont had hoped for an effect on Quaker belief, at the time still plastic and uncodified. But he encountered serious resistance from George Fox.[5][22][23] Keith collaborated on van Helmont's Paradoxal Discourses of 1685, but went to some pains to deny he held the same opinions.[24]

In a A Cabbalistical Dialogue (Latin version first, 1677, in English 1682) he launched a defence of kabbalist metaphysics. He had been closely associated with the Kabbala Denudata of Rosenroth. The Dialogue puts matter and spirit on a continuum, describing matter as a "coalition" of monads.[25][26] There are various views on the evolution of the concept of "monad", which Conway and Van Helmont shared with Leibniz. Physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein found this to be a kind of Pandeism.[27] From the same period, the attributed work Adumbratio Kabbalae Christianae, sometimes included with the Kabbala Denudata as an anonymous essay, purported to be a tract to convert Jews to Christianity, but equally served as an introduction to Christian Kabbalist views, and the identification of Adam Kadmon of the Lurianic Kabbalah with Christ.[28]

In his last years he was in Germany, and continued to work closely with Leibniz. It has been argued that Leibniz may have written the final book to appear under van Helmont's name, the Quaedam praemeditatae et consideratae cogitationes super quattuor capita libri primi Moisis (Amsterdam 1697), translated in English in 1701 as Premeditate and Considerate Thoughts, on the early chapters of the Book of Genesis.[29]

^John Marshall (2006). John Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture: Religious Intolerance and Arguments for Religious Toleration in Early Modern and 'early Enlightenment' Europe. Cambridge University Press. p. 494. ISBN0521129575.

^Allison Coudert (1991). "Forgotten Ways of Knowing". In Donald R. Kelley, Richard Henry Popkin. The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment: From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Springer. pp. 87–8. ISBN9401054274.

^B. J. Gibbons (2001). Spirituality and the Occult: From the Renaissance to the Modern Age. Psychology Press. p. 22. ISBN041524448X.